Today we had the Spanish assembly at school. It was mostly pointless but still a fair bit of fun. Our class had formed a tuna, which sounds really funny but is a sort of Spanish band. The girls were supposed to sit around little tables and pretend we were at a cafe while the boys sang and played tamborines and things. The song was about carnations, and the teacher had bought a lot of silk carnations for two of the boys to hand out to us during the song. The act before us had been a tango and the guy had had a rose between his teeth for the first half. Halfway through the dance he had passed it to the girl and she had held it in her teeth for the rest of the dance. So Thomas and Neel decided this was a groovy idea and we were going to do it too. After much arranging of capes and practicing of lyrics, we went out and sat down. They sang their song and Thomas and Neel had to pass a carnation to every single girl onstage. Luckily the stems were good and long and so things didn't get too difficult, except for some of the stems getting tangled in each other while Thomas was trying to get them apart. The teacher said we could keep the flowers afterwards, so now I've got a red silk carnation. It's funny how much more interesting things look - a lunchbox, a book, a chair - when they've got this long-stemmed flower on top of them. Even if it is fake. The song was:

Mocita dame el clavel,
Dame el clavel de tu boca,
Que pá eso no hay que tener
Mucha vergüenza ni poca.
Yo te daré el cascabel,
Te lo prometo mocita,
Si tu me das esa miel
Que llevas en la boquita.

Clavelitos, clavelitos,
Clavelitos de mi corazón.
Hoy te traigo clavelitos
Colorados igual que un tizón.
Si algún día clavelitos
No lograra poderte traer,
No te creas que ya no te quiero,
Es que no te los pude cojer.

La tarde que a media luz
Vi tu boquita de guinda,
Yo no he visto en Santa Cruz
Otra mocita más linda.
Y luego al ver el clavel
Que llevabas en el pelo,
Mirándolo creí ver
Un pedacito de cielo.

Which translates to:

Girl, give me the carnation
Give the carnation of your mouth
(I can't understand these two lines for the life of me, but they're something about it doesn't have to be a lot of shame, or even a little)
I will give you this bell
That I promise you, girl
If you give me this honey
That you carry in your mouth.


Little carnations, carnations,
carnations from my heart
Today I bring you carnations
The color of flame.
If someday I can't get
carnations to bring you
Don't think I don't love you-
It's that I can't get any.


That evening when at twilight
I saw your mouth like a cherry
In Santa Cruz I never saw
Another girl as beautiful as you.
And then I saw the carnation
You were wearing in your hair
Looking at it I thought I saw
A little piece of heaven.


In our version the last line of the chorus was "it's that my wife won't let me." It had been crossed out and replaced with "It's that I can't get any." When I asked the teacher, she said it was because we didn't want to offend anybody. Ha. Folk songs are not about not offending people.

I'm not sure if I got most of that translated correctly. I assumed "mocita" would be the diminutive of "moca", but apparently that means mocha and I doubted anybody would write a song about a small coffee. But another dictionary listed "mocito" as "youngster", so I translated "mocita" as "girl". And I don't understand the middle four lines of the first verse at all. But I love translations.

April 29
May 6